‘Red Oaks’ Is The Show We All Need Right Now

If you haven’t seen season 1 of the Amazon original series Red Oaks, damn are you in for a treat. All 10 half-hour episodes are streaming on Prime Video now, and are very much worth your time. Hurry up, go check it out, because season 2 premieres this Friday, and you’ll want to be caught up with the gang from Red Oaks Country Club.

The series takes place in the mid-80s at a country club in New Jersey, and follows the lives of the president of said club (Paul Reiser as Mr. Getty) all the way down to the assistant tennis pro David (Craig Roberts) and everyone in between. The show is sweet and silly and at times even ventures towards sappiness, but it’s a rare breed in this day and age: it doesn’t feel the pressure to be sad or snarky. The show explores crushes and relationships, figuring out what you want to do with your life, and what happens when you thought you had it all figured out and then things come crashing down. Red Oaks stays delightfully optimistic about love, about people, and about the world. And really, what better time to fire up an episode, amiright?

As we come down from this crazy election and from rants on every social media platform, it’s nice to take a trip back to a simpler time. Nothing about Red Oaks, will stress you out. It will make you feel happy—hopeful, even! The positive outlook of the show is certainly no accident. Creators Gregory Jacobs and Joe Gangemi knew exactly what they were doing with this one. “We’re not overly cynical people,” Jacobs explained. “We’re trying to make something that we like. It’s grounded and, at times, emotional and sad, but the world is funny. And that’s exactly what we were going for tone-wise.”

“Various characters get put through the ringer, but we want this to be fun for people. We want this show to be something that you want to keep watching, not a chore. It’s supposed to be fun. The world needs Red Oaks right now. After watching a debate, you’ve gotta put on Red Oaks.”

“I speak for both of us when I say that neither of us had really done comedy before,” Gangemi added. “This was our first foray into comedy. We both came from dark, heavy stuff and we still love that stuff. I mean, he produces The Knick, which is about as dark as can be. But we both looked at each other and had these stories that we always wanted to tell and shared for years as buddies and we wanted to see if we could do it. I know I definitely went through a period of ‘Can I do this? Can I be funny?’ You have to give yourself permission. It’s like getting up at open mic night. So that was what I discovered about myself: a new tone, a new voice that I love and have so much fun doing. I want to do a lot more of this. This is really a fun place to play.”

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That doesn’t mean the entire season is super bright and cheery all the way through. There are of course relationship ups and downs, and some legal woes, among other speed bumps that the characters will face. Alexandra Socha, who plays Skye Getty noted, “It was interesting to work on this season because it is deeper and it is more melancholy.”

“There’s a sweetness at the core, which I think resonates in all the relationships, in all of the writing,” explained Reiser. “I think they’ve actually done a good job of avoiding a lot of trends of not being sappy. And in the best sense, not trying to be edgy.”

Jennifer Grey, who plays David’s recently divorced mom, Judy, went on to say, “They have me kiss a girl but they don’t then have me go to bed with her. And it’s like, ‘Oh, what a surprise.’”

“I also see a lot of shows where the opener – and I get turned off so quick – where the opening show or the opening shot of the pilot will be a hooker or bondage and I’m going, that’s not really as interesting or as edgy as you guys think it is.”

As the show enters its second season, Reiser and Grey have yet to share a scene together — but Jacobs and Gangemi did work on putting some unexpected cast members together on screen this season. “This season, you have the benefit of having worked with these folks and going, ‘Wow, this person and this person had great chemistry,’ sometimes not even on screen, sometimes they have great chemistry hanging out on set,” Gangemi pointed out. “So we would say, ‘How are we going to get Getty to cross with Nash? Or wouldn’t it be fun to see Richard (Kind) and Resier?’ The road trip episode (“Lost and Found”, episode 8 this season) entirely came out of putting that group of guys together in a car. Just what would happen, what would be fun to have those actors have bounce off of each other?”

And the creators know that we all have our favorite characters, so you’ll be sure to see them at some point this season, according to Jacobs. “We will literally chart it out and make sure that we’re touching on people at key points and that we haven’t lost them. It was important to us to figure out how to land everybody in a way that felt satisfying.”

Gangemi went on to say, “It’s the benefit of having a really strong ensemble cast, too, because you can write the ensemble, you don’t have to focus everything on a single character. We’re really lucky that we have Paul, and we have Richard, and we have Jen, and they’re veterans. They show up and they’re just pros. They just hit it. There’s not a lot of, ‘let me find the character,’ and struggling. They just laser-focus in on who these people are.”

So how did someone like Reiser land on a show like Red Oaks, and in a rather unexpected role for the actor? “Paul was in two of my top-10 movies, Aliens and Diner – but when we were casting the part it was tricky because you meet with a lot of people who are the obvious comedian choices and get a list of all of these comedians, but we were immediately like ‘Paul!’” Gangemi recalled.

“He’s a complicated character by design,” said Jacobs. “We didn’t want to write a show where he’s a mustache twirler. In fact, that’s the way we write. As soon as we start to feel like, ‘Okay, we’ve done four or five episodes of this character being this, what can we do that completely turns a corner or shows a side of them?’ Take Barry (Josh Meyers), who is a character you’d think would be one note, and how can we turn an enemy into a weird ally? Cause that’s just fun.”

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“Everybody’s got shades to them,” he continued. “That’s something about Reiser’s character that I think is interesting and he’s so good at, is he’s our antagonist but he’s got a heart and he loves his wife. And he clearly loves his daughter. But he’s kind of a motherfucker. But he’s not all bad.”

“And we loved that combination, that he’s funny and he’s a stand-up comedian and he riffs great lines on set but he can also bring the kind of intensity and the darkness. [Getty] is his own worst enemy. But Paul is a real sweetheart, and a great guy,” Gangemi went on to say about Reiser.

One of the best parts about this show continues to be that no matter how old or how rich or how good at tennis any particular character maybe, they are all, in their own ways, figuring out who they are. So even though the show might take place 30 years ago, it still feels entirely relevant to today.

“That’s very purposeful on our part,” Jacobs explained. “We really went out of our way to not have people walking around with Rubik’s cubes and brick phones. Because we didn’t want the props and the wardrobe to be these laugh out loud sight gags. The thing I like about the show, I think that works, is the coming of age aspect of it. It’s timeless. It’s not really that different now. But it was a more innocent time.”

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Indeed it was, which is what makes Red Oaks such a breath of fresh air for this crazy week. No matter what party you identify with, you’ll find something pleasant about Red Oaks. And if you just can’t let the politics go quite yet, well, there is something for you too, in the form of some choice words for Rudy Giuliani.

As Getty faces some pretty serious legal troubles, he uses his words to blame Giuliani, who was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time. “We wanted to do it last season and the lawyers were like, ‘Well, can you soft pedal making fun of Giuliani?’, Gangemi remembered. “And you never say that to Greg and I, that we were like, season 2 let’s double down on it. Like, let’s add 5 more Giuliani references. I’m a nice guy so I would start to feel bad about it, but in the last month or two I don’t feel bad at all. I was like, ‘Alright. No problem at all making fun of Giuliani.’

And for Reiser who delivers the lines, it was not his first brush with Giuliani. “Did you know he actually did a cameo on Mad About You? I had totally forgotten. It was in the early 90s. We did a thing with a crazy cab driver scene and then we had to do under the credits, “Hi, I’m Giuliani. I’m the mayor. New York cab drivers: don’t do that at all, and don’t be afraid to come to New York. It was funny.”